Viñoly Unveils Renovation of London’s Battersea Power Station

[image via BD Online]
This week saw Rafael Viñoly debut his proposed renovation of London’s much-loved Battersea Power Station. The design includes a massive tower and bizarre glassed-in micro-city / biodome that bears little to no relationship with the existing power plant and its context. Predictably, reviews have not been kind — the word “menace” has [...]

A Floating Room and Broken Architecture: The Work of Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset

[Social Mobility (Staircase) - image via Galleri Nicolai Wallner]

Suspended from two black balloons, a sparse white room floats to the top of a repurposed Berlin train station. I’ve been haunted by this image—or rather the resulting imagined implications of it—since a trip to Berlin almost 5 years ago. It was, of course, an art installation [...]

Gehry On Campus and In the News

[image via NPR.org]
Two Frank Gehry buildings—one existing and one proposed—have found their way into the news lately…and not for good reasons.

ITEM 1: In NPR’s coverage of the Iowa floods, they took a look at the University of Iowa’s Advanced Technology Building, designed by Frank Gehry. Despite surrounding the signature, metal-clad building with sandbags, water has [...]

Hadid Proposal: REJECTED

[images via The Architect's Journal]
Zaha Hadid has proposed a very Zaha Hadid extension to the Middle East Centre at St Antony’s College in Oxford. Alas, it is not too be. Designed around a delightfully academic and relatively simple program of reading room, library, storage, and lecture hall, the proposed addition, known as The Softbridge (does [...]

The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco

Some photos I’ve been meaning to post from last week’s press opening of the new CJM in San Francisco. More thoughts on this later, but in general, I have to say I was surprisingly impressed. Click through for the full gallery, and also check out my post over at Curbed SF for a little more [...]

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